Chapter-3 - Thompson

Systematicity and Normative Justification
Hegel's Political Philosophy: On the Normative

Significance of Method and System
Thom Brooks and Sebastian Stein
Print publication date: 2017

Print ISBN-13: 9780198778165
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: June 2017
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198778165.001.0001

The Method of Hegel’s Philosophical Science of Right
Kevin Thompson
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198778165.003.0003
Abstract and Keywords

This chapter examines systematicity as a form of normative justification.
Thompson’s contention is that the Hegelian commitment to fundamental
presuppositionlessness and hence to methodological immanence, from which his
distinctive conception of systematicity flows, is at the core of the unique form of
normative justification that he employs in his political philosophy and that this is
the only form of such justification that can successfully meet the skeptic’s
challenge. Central to Thompson’s account is the distinction between
systematicity and representation and the way in which this frames Hegel’s
relationship to the traditional forms of justification and the creation of his own
distinctive kind of normative argumentation.
Keywords: Hegel, method, systematicity, German Idealism, metaphysics, philosophy of right
The aim of what follows is to set out an interpretation of the method of

normative justification that Hegel employs in his political philosophy. By this I
mean the form of argumentation by which the validity and soundness of the
central doctrines of the Elements of the Philosophy of Right are established. But
perhaps no other aspect of Hegel’s political theory has been more controversial
than the relationship between its core doctrines and what Hegel called its
scientific or speculative method or, to put the issue more broadly, the
relationship between the substantive normative claims of Hegel’s political
philosophy and the metaphysical doctrines of his broader philosophical system.1
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The current field of studies of Hegel’s political philosophy can be divided into
four main tendencies defined by two distinct axes: systematic vs. non-systematic
and metaphysical vs. non-metaphysical. The first tendency holds that the
systematic order of Hegel’s thought is essentially tied to the metaphysical claims
that it makes about the nature of reality and that both of these together provide
the foundation for his political theory.2 The second agrees that the systematic
structure of Hegel’s work is significant (p.45) for its normative claims, but
believes this can be detached from its metaphysical core.3 The third tendency
attributes little significance to the systematic form of Hegel’s work, holding,
instead, that its real significance lies in its core metaphysical commitments.4
Finally, though it acknowledges Hegel’s systematic and metaphysical ambitions,
the fourth tendency finds both to be dismal failures and, instead, seeks to isolate
what remains philosophically valuable and coherent amidst the rubble.5 As noted
in the Introduction, I will be offering an interpretation that takes the systematic
character of Hegel’s thought and the metaphysical commitments that issue from
it to be absolutely essential not only to understanding the core claims of his
political philosophy, but, more importantly, to assessing their philosophical
merits. As such, the present study stands clearly in the wake of the first
tendency. However, the interpretation of the relationship between the organizing
structure and metaphysical doctrines of Hegel’s philosophical system and the
normative theses of his political philosophy that I begin to develop in this
chapter has been enriched by all four of the tendencies in varying ways.
Moreover, I believe that the debate over this issue has demonstrated that
understanding the link between systematic structure and normative justification
must stand as a litmus test for any reading that hopes to do justice to Hegel’s
thought in a way that will also allow it to speak beyond its own historical
context.
We must acknowledge that Hegel himself is partly responsible for the debates in
the literature. He tells us quite clearly and quite adamantly that his political
philosophy is to be judged solely in terms of its “philosophical manner of
progressing from one matter to another and of conducting a scientific proof, the
speculative way of knowing in general” (GW 14,1, 5/Werke 7, 12/Nisbet, 10). But
rather than including an exposition of this methodology in the work itself, Hegel
notoriously takes a “familiarity with scientific method” (GW 14,1, 5/Werke 7, 12/
Nisbet, 10) for granted: “As for (p.46) what constitutes the scientific procedure
of philosophy, that is presupposed here on the basis of philosophical logic” (GPR
§2A). As a result, the exact nature and status of the work’s core claims were left
ill defined. Accordingly, the task of the present chapter is to begin to rectify this
situation. To do so, it considers two fundamental questions: (1) what exactly is
speculative method?; and (2) how does this method serve as a form of normative
justification?
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The strategy I will follow in addressing these questions will be to set out a
comparison between Hegel’s systematic conception of normative justification,
what he calls the “philosophical science of right,” and the rationalist and
empiricist forms of demonstration that have defined the Western tradition of
political theory and, particularly, as these shaped late eighteenth-century and
early nineteenth-century German political thought. The chapter’s principal
thesis is that the distinctiveness of Hegel’s methodology lies in the fact that,
unlike the traditional approaches, it holds the justification of a normative claim
to require showing that it is necessarily entailed as a moment in the immanent
unfolding of the concept of freedom within a general systematic order of
knowledge. The normative standing of a concept, principle, institution, or
practice, for Hegel, on this reading, thus flows from its being established as a
necessary moment in an arrangement of knowledge that is itself immune to
skeptical challenge precisely by virtue of its systematic form. Normativity, in
short, is a product of the systematic structure of the science of right.
The key to this view is Hegel’s contention that the traditional forms of normative
argumentation fail to establish the authoritativeness of their claims because they
are rooted in the dogmatism of what Hegel calls “representation.” Hegel argues
that representation renders any normative claims vulnerable to the challenges
posed by skepticism and this motivates his commitment to a distinctly
presuppositionless form of systematic justification. Accordingly, I begin by
setting out an account of normativity and the traditional forms of justification
that have been developed to secure the authoritativeness of fundamental norms.
I show how these, on Hegel’s analysis, fail because they take for granted the
epistemic certainty both of their object and of their methodology. I then, in turn,
use this critique to construct an interpretation of systematicity as a general form
of epistemic argumentation and, from this, develop, by means of a reading of the
opening paragraphs of the Elements of the Philosophy of Right, an account of
systematicity as a unique form of distinctly normative justification.
2.1. Normativity and the Traditional Representational Forms of Justification

Hegel’s political philosophy aspires to establish what is arguably the most
fundamental norm of the political domain: state sovereignty. Now a concept,
standard, institution, or practice is said to be normative to the extent that it
makes a claim to authority. And it does this insofar as it asserts not just that it
possesses a binding hold with regard to (p.47) someone or something as to
what is good, permissible, forbidden, or obligatory, but that it is rightfully
entitled to possess such a hold. In the case of sovereignty, the claim at issue is
that the state possesses supreme authority, the right to rule, over its citizenry. As
a claimed status, though, normativity requires demonstration of its warrant to
this standing. That is to say, it stands in need of justification.
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Now for a method of justification to succeed in establishing a genuine grounding

for a norm such as sovereignty, it must do so in a way that overcomes the
challenge classically posed by skepticism. For any justification offered for a
norm, the skeptic undertakes to show that this grounding is either an
unwarranted assertion (that the grounding is arbitrary, merely a hypothesis), a
foundation that itself stands in need of justification (that the grounding opens on
to an infinite regress), or an account that presupposes what it seeks to establish
(that the grounding is actually viciously circular). This challenge—what has been
termed the “Agrippan trilemma”—has set the agenda for all the various forms of
justification since their inception.6 In the normative domain, this has meant that
the task has been to develop a mode of argumentation that successfully
outflanks the Agrippan challenge, while grounding the authority of some
principle or concept with respect to the activities and dispositions of an agent or
group of agents.
The central methodological question that any attempt to ground the norm of
sovereignty confronts, then, is how can it justify the supreme authority of the
state in such a way that it is safeguarded against falling prey to the challenges
posed by skepticism. Hegel’s answer to this challenge is systematic normative
justification, the “philosophical science of right”. Systematicity is thus properly
seen, in Hegel, not simply as an exercise in constructing an order of
interdependent claims and concepts, nor as an expression of some abstruse
desire for totalization, but rather as a distinctive method of establishing warrant,
in the present case, normative warrant.
Now I shall argue that the key to the success of Hegel’s conception of
systematicity in avoiding the threats of skepticism is its distinctive epistemic
commitment to presuppositionlessness.7 Put simply, this means that systematic
justification is dedicated to taking nothing for granted, assuming neither rules of
procedure, nor even the subject matter it is to examine. Instead, this form of
argumentation derives its mode of demonstration wholly from observation of the
immanent unfolding of its most basic concept: in the case of political philosophy,
the concept of right (Recht).
The radicality of Hegel’s political philosophy, like that of his philosophical

enterprise as a whole, thus flows, as Hegel himself often reminded us, not
primarily from the principles, concepts, or even the doctrines that it propounds,
but from the systematic method it employs, “the only true one, the one identical
to its contents” (Enz. [1817] 5/46) (p.48) or what he also calls “the resolve to
will to think purely” (Enz. [1817] §36A). But what exactly does a
presuppositionless science of right mean and how is this approach able to
overcome the skeptical threats of arbitrariness, regressivity, and vicious
circularity?
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Hegel’s central contention is that all other competing methods of normative

justification fail because they are fundamentally dogmatic modes of
argumentation and, as such, are vulnerable to the skeptic’s challenges. The
nerve of his argument for this admittedly dramatic and perplexing claim is the
idea that the dogmatism of traditional forms of justification flows from their
being what he calls representational forms of justification. A form of
argumentation is representational, for Hegel, just insofar as it employs any
preconceived notions or makes use of ungrounded assumptions, all of these
presuppositions deriving from a common source, representation (Vorstellung),
the mental power by which we create images, symbols, and signs and construct
narratives. Thus, what defines a truly philosophical science of right as a
presuppositionless form of normative justification and what separates it from the
traditional methods of demonstration is its ability to generate both its method
and its object independent of the resources of representation.
Now, obviously, this crucial claim requires further explication. It will suffice, for
our present purposes, however, simply to note that Hegel took systematic and
representational modes of normative justification to be mutually exclusive and
exhaustive philosophical enterprises and, as such, they also constitute, for him,
the only conceptually viable strategies for grounding norms. Thus, in order for
us to see the motives, methodological imperatives, and fundamental structure of
Hegel’s distinctive approach, it will be useful to begin by developing an account
of what he meant by the dependency of the traditional forms of normative
justification upon representation. We can then use this analysis to construct an
interpretation of the presuppositionless form of normative demonstration that
constitutes the philosophical science of right.
2.1.1. The Traditional Forms of Normative Justification: Rationalism and Empiricism

In what are admittedly broad terms, rationalism and empiricism have been the
two principal methods for establishing the authoritativeness of the ultimate
grounds of conduct and character in the Western tradition of practical
philosophy. Rationalism seeks to derive normative principles from properties it
holds to be necessary features of the fundamental order of things, while
empiricism claims that such standards derive their standing from various kinds
of facts such as sentiment, inclination, tradition, language, and culture. The
fundamental difference between these strands can be said to lie in their
antithetical conceptions of rationality.8 For rationalism, reason is (p.49)
principally an intuitive power. It is able not only to engage in discursive thought
—such as conceiving, judging, and inferring—it is also capable of perceiving or
grasping the fundamental structure of being, the providential order of reality.
For empiricism, reason is nothing more than its discursive ability. It simply
conceives, judges, and infers things about the data it receives from the senses.
The former contemplates the order of things, while the latter produces order out
of random contingency. Each method can thus be said to be rooted in a different
form of intuition. For rationalism, it is reason’s own intellectual intuition that has
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insight into the fundamental order of being, while, for empiricism, it is sensible
intuition that is the root of reason’s creations. These different conceptions in
turn lead to different understandings of normativity and correspondingly
different forms of justification.
To justify a norm for rationalism is to do nothing less than to see that the
principle, concept, institution, or practice making a claim to binding authority is
itself specified by or determinable within the providential order of nature, the
fundamental structure of reality. For instance, that crimes require punishment
may be grasped as part and parcel of the objective moral order. This principle is
normative, that is, it is vested with obligatory moral force, however, because it is
itself the ground or it is grounded in the law of nature. Normative justification,
on this view, establishes the authoritativeness of something by showing that the
claim in question possesses the requisite status within the totality of the moral
order of the world or that it is deducible from a claim that does. It follows that,
for rationalism, one acts rightly or one’s disposition is virtuous when one is in
accord with the laws of being discoverable by reason through intellectual
intuition.
On the empiricist construal, a principle, concept, institution, or practice is

normative to the extent that it is endorsed or is laid down as binding by some
individual or corporate willing. Crime requires punishment, on this view, not
because some fundamental moral order dictates this, but because an
authoritative person or group holds to this principle, concept, institution, or
practice as necessary, required, for instance, for the maintenance of social order.
Justification is here thus a matter of there being an appropriate desiring of
something to be normative and this alone being sufficient to make it so. For
empiricism, then, one acts rightly only when one follows one’s own conventions;
reason here is subservient to the demands of what is found in and though
sensible intuition.
Now the rationalist and empiricist forms of justification and normativity defined
the conceptual space of German political thought in the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries and they thus provided the foundations for quite
specific doctrines and movements concerning the nature and purpose of the
state and of social order. And it was on this determinate and contested terrain
that Hegel sought to establish the radicality of the systematic method.
Rationalism’s insight into the natural moral order was taken, by theorists of
Enlightened Absolutism, such as Seckendorff, Pufendorf, Wolff, Garve, Eberhard,
and the Cameralists (Justi and Sonnenfels), to support the notion that the
authority of the (p.50) ruler lies in his commitment to providing and promoting
the material and spiritual welfare of his citizenry and that these goals were to be
achieved through the strict and centralized regulation of industry and trade,
price controls, public education, and censorship of the press.9 State paternalism
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was thus thought to be the means to secure the principles and attendant
blessings of the providential order.
Empiricism, on the other hand, bore a more complex lineage in this period of
German political thought as it was the root of both Conservatism and
Romanticism. For Conservatives, such as Möser, Rehberg, Gentz, and Wieland,
the reliance upon empirical warrant was taken to mean that the authority to rule
is properly derived from historical sanction and that the well-being of society
was to be ensured by the establishment and support of the ties of tradition
afforded by religion, culture, language, and the public rituals whereby a people
are bound to one another as a cohesive community.10 However, for Romantics,
such as Herder, the Schlegels, Schleiermacher, Novalis, Fries, and Savigny, the
purpose of the state was to promote and provide for the rights and freedoms of
its citizens to form communal associations and the requisite principles for
creating this social order were freedom of the press, religious tolerance, and
equality of opportunity.11 For them, the authority of the sovereign lay in the
devotion of the citizenry spurred by the majestic aura that true artists and
tradition create around him.
Hegel’s decisive insight was to recognize that these divergent strands of

political rationality could all be traced back, in differing ways, to the traditional
forms of normative justification. He was thereby able to cut through their
ideological and programmatic differences and unearth their underlying
fundamental methodological orientations. Following from this, he was able to
see that these traditional forms of normative justification took their respective
subject matters and procedures for granted because they shared a common
reliance upon representation and it was this, he argued, that rendered them all
vulnerable to the charges of arbitrariness, regressivity, and vicious circularity:
the skeptical trilemma.
2.1.2. Normativity and the Problem of Representation

Hegel’s critique of rationalism and empiricism as forms of normative
justification develops in three distinct stages: he first sets out a basic critique of
representationalism (p.51) as a form of philosophical knowledge; from this
analysis, he then proposes general criticisms of rationalism and empiricism as
distinct kinds of representational knowledge; and then, based on this, he derives
specific objections to each as accounts of distinctly normative justification.
In the opening paragraph of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in

Outline (1817) Hegel draws a sharp distinction between representation and
genuine forms of knowledge:
All sciences other than philosophy have objects that are given (zugegeben)
as immediate from representation (Vorstellung), and they are thus
presupposed (vorausgesetzt) as assumed (angenommen) from the
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beginning of science, so that in the course of further development,

requisite and needed determinations are taken from representation. (Enz.
[1817] §1)
Hegel employs the term representation here, as he does throughout his mature
writings, to refer not only to a specific sort of mental content but, more
fundamentally, to a distinctive kind of human capacity: the mental power by
which images, symbols, and signs are created (cf. Enz. [1817] §§373–83).
Representation, in this sense, is an ability set over against both empirical
intuition (Anschauung), in that the content it creates is not dependent on the
immediate presence of its object, and against thought (Denken), in that its
content is nonetheless inseparable from its figurative presentation. Images,
symbols, and signs, Hegel claims, are generic enough to be separated or
abstracted from that to which they refer—be it an individual object, a concept,
or a more complex state of affairs—yet they still remain tied to their sensuous
origin in that their particular configuration is still set by this source. In other
words, representations as created by our representative capacity are, at once,
particular and general figures that serve to denote other, more concrete, mental
or physical objects.
The distinction that Hegel wishes to draw in this passage is thus between bodies
of knowledge that are composed of or, at least, rooted in these sorts of images
and philosophical forms of knowledge, which take concepts rather than
representations as their resource and object. A concept, for Hegel, is distinctive
in that it comprehends the fundamental essence of a thing without recourse to
any kind of symbolic or figurative elements derived from sensible intuition. It is
a setting forth of the fundamental structure of a thing purely in terms of its
essential properties, where the relationship between these is a matter of logical
necessity. Whereas representational forms of knowledge draw their objects
ready made from the power of representation; they thus take over their objects
from sensible intuition and thus presuppose, rather than deduce, both the
subject matter of their inquiry and the relations between its various objects.
Hegel offers examples of representations as they function as the subject matter

or object of inquiry in various sciences: magnitude is taken to be the object of
mathematics, space is the object of geometry, number is the object of arithmetic,
disease is the object of medicine, animals are the objects of zoology, and plants
are the objects of botany (Enz. [1817] §1A). He contends that, despite the rather
wide array of objects and sciences invoked here, each of these is nothing other
than a generic conception that has (p.52) been forged through generalization
and comparison from the raw material of sensible experience. The details of how
this works in each case need not concern us here. What is important to note is
that all these objects possess a necessarily indeterminate epistemic, and as we
shall see, normative, status. As representations, each of these objects of inquiry
stand between the spatio-temporal individuals of empirical intuition and the
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unbounded universalities of conceptual thought. And this means that these

objects are necessarily defined by an admixture of contingent and arbitrary
associations, ones either produced in the formative process itself or already
present as a feature of the existing empirical source from which they were
derived. Hegel’s argument is that this intermediate status is what renders not
just the objects, but the methods of representational argumentation that draw
upon them, impotent before the skeptical trilemma.
Consider first the objects. Representational forms of knowledge take the objects
they wish to investigate for granted since representation, as a faculty,
continually makes them available, literally it places (stellen) them before (vor) us
for investigation. Accordingly, these objects are always on hand, ready to be
explored. But this means that in accepting these objects as they are, their
existence is never called into question. They simply are, and, as such, they can
be presupposed: “Such a science does not have to justify the necessity of the
objects that it treats … because they [its objects] are assumed to be existent
from representation” (Enz. [1817] §1A). But if an account of the very existence of
some object is not required, then its warrant to be a valid subject matter for
rational explanation is left outstanding and any concepts, inferences, and claims
derived from or about this object are necessarily open to the accusation of being
mere assumptions rather than genuine knowledge.
If we turn now to the methodologies of such forms of knowledge, we find that

the examination of a representational object amounts to nothing more than
unpacking the determinations it already contains. With the givenness of the
object comes the givenness of its properties. The methodological task, then, is
simply to extract these determinations and, by doing so, claim to have derived
genuine knowledge about the subject matter. Hegel provides a succinct
description of this process: “At first, such an object is given its familiar name.
This is fixed, yet it initially gives only the representation of the matter. But more
determinations of the matter must be given. These can, certainly, be taken
(aufgenommen) from the immediate representation” (Enz. [1817] §1A). The
procedure Hegel describes here is a mix of analysis and observation that, in the
end, produces a set of features that can only be contingent generalities, instead
of the necessary and essential properties that genuine knowledge requires.
Accordingly, representation renders the method and objects of representational

forms of knowledge necessarily arbitrary, unwarranted, and presupposed, the
core charges of the skeptic. But how does this general critique of
representationalism apply to rationalist and empiricist forms of epistemic
justification?
Hegel examines the representational underpinnings of rationalism as the rubric

common to the projects of classical, medieval, and modern metaphysics. He
argues that this form of knowledge takes its object, the structure of reality, from
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the empirical (p.53) world by abstracting from it all that it deems to be in

conflict with the universality of natural law. This order’s existence as well as its
intellectual intuitability are thus both taken for granted and, as such, the
supposedly natural order of being—defined by its principal objects: the soul, the
world, and God—is a foundation lacking a warrant to be what it purports to be.
Hegel makes this point quite precisely:
Its objects are certainly totalities, which in and for themselves belong to
reason—soul, world, God—but metaphysics took them from representation,
establishing itself on them as complete, given subjects by applying the
determinations of the understanding and had only its representation for its
criterion as to whether the predicates fitted and were satisfactory or not.
(Enz. [1817] §20)
Similarly, rationalism’s methodology seeks to produce genuine knowledge by

taking various properties—such as existence, finitude, and simplicity—all of
which have been abstracted from experience, and ascribing them to the natural
order, what Hegel calls trying “to determine the absolute through the attribution
of predicates” (Enz. [1817] §19). In this sense, rationalism strives to construct an
account of the in-itself, the unconditioned, with the finite determinations of
representation. It thereby substitutes the contingent for the necessary, the
transient for the essential. The result is a rigid, exclusionary conception of truth
where only one side of opposed attributes can be true, a position Hegel
designates as the very epitome of dogmatism (Enz. [1817] §21).
Empiricism, for Hegel, also takes its object as well as its method from
representation, but unlike rationalistic metaphysics, it seeks to preserve the full
breadth and density of this sensuous domain through its appeal to the
immediacy of experience. Empiricism thus begins as a rejection of the
abstractions of rationalism, searching for a new concrete and sure foundation in
sensible, rather than intellectual, intuition. But in doing so, it falls prey to the
very same strand of dogmatism because it simply takes the content of
perception, feeling, tradition, and sentiment and tries to elevate these
contextually bound, particular experiences to the status of universal, eternal
principles and concepts, the content of genuine philosophical knowledge. To do
this, empiricism has to disentangle the concrete nexus presented by these facets
of experience and distill a supposedly essential set of properties. The result is
precisely the kind of abstractions that empiricism had sought to reject. Hegel
sums up this aspiration and its failure in a rather succinct formulation:
[Empiricism] takes not only the entire content of representation but also all
the content and determination of thought as it is found in sensory
perception, with feeling and intuition as an external or internal fact of
consciousness, or as it believes it can derive it, and it takes these empirical
facts in general and their analysis for the source of truth, but either denies
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the supersensory altogether or at any rate all knowledge of it, and makes
only the form of abstraction, identical positing, available for thought.
(Enz. [1817] §26)
Now if Hegel is correct in this assessment and the objects and methods of
rationalism and empiricism are indeed taken from representation, then they
must be either wholly arbitrary, infinitely regressive, or viciously circular. As a
consequence, each approach (p.54) vitiates its own work because the
insufficiency of their respective foundations and modes of demonstration must
necessarily flow to all the concepts, claims, and inferences that are derivable
from them. This means, of course, that not only is the epistemic status of the
knowledge each purports to derive in question, but their normative standing is
in jeopardy as well. If the moral order or the empirical world serve as nothing
more than covert assumptions or brute assertions, and if rationalist attribution
and empiricist analysis amount simply to means for portraying the ephemeral as
the eternal, then the authoritativeness of the principles, concepts, and
institutions derived from them can make no validly binding claim on the conduct
or character of agents.
Hegel draws the implications of this critique of rationalism and empiricism as

forms of knowledge for their corresponding concrete species of normative
justification in the introduction to the Elements of the Philosophy of Right. In the
domain of practical philosophy, he contends, rationalist metaphysics, which he
calls the “formal” method, takes its principal task to be the formulation of the
definition of right itself as opposed to the determination of the rightfulness of
specific acts or claims. To define right, in this sense, is thus to grasp it as a
principle endemic to the natural moral order. Now, as we shall see, Hegel will
agree that the main charge of a genuine science of right is to set out what right
itself is, that it must begin from a proper deduction of right. The problem with
rationalism as a form of normative justification, for Hegel, is thus not with its
aim, but with the way in which it seeks to ground the concept of right.
Rationalist normative projects purport to derive the concept of right by way of
intellectual intuition. But this is really nothing more than abstraction and
attribution from representation: “But [in this way] the deduction of the definition
becomes something reached by etymology, by abstraction from particular cases,
so that it is grounded in the feelings and representations of human beings. The
correctness of the definition is therefore posited in its agreement with prevailing
representations” (GPR §2A). As such, right itself is rendered nothing more than a
generic conception and, as such, it is filled with all the contingencies and
arbitrariness of the empirical fount from which it is fashioned. Rationalist
metaphysics therefore makes of right an unwarranted posit: arbitrary, open to
infinite regress, and vicious circularity.
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Hegel considers empiricism as a form of normative justification under the guise

of two distinct kinds of Romanticism: subjectivism and historicism.12 Both seek
to root the concept of right in sensible intuition because only here, they contend,
can it have the kind of concreteness that such principles require in order to
move those under their authority to act. As with rationalism, Hegel will affirm
the basic intent of this approach: right must be concrete in order to compel
action. But subjectivism and historicism seek determinacy in representation, the
only difference between them is whether the “source of right” from which its
warrant is drawn is personal (subjective) or communal (historical).
(p.55) For subjectivism, Hegel argues, the idea of right and its further
determinations “are immediately taken up and asserted as facts of
consciousness, and our natural or intensified feelings, our own heart and
enthusiasm, are made the source of right” (GPR §2A), whereas in historicism
“the emergence and development of determinations of rights as they appear in
time,” what Hegel also terms, “development from historical grounds,” “is
confused with development from the concept,” a confusion that illegitimately
extends “the significance of historical explanation and justification” into
“justification which is valid in and for itself” (GPR §3A). Empiricism, like
rationalism, thus constructs right as a problematically determinate figure drawn
from the well of representation, rather than as a genuinely rational, grounded
concept. And in so doing, empiricism, like the rationalism it seeks to oppose,
deprives right of any basis for its claim to possess binding authority over human
conduct and character.
Hegel viewed the contested conceptual space of late eighteenth- and early
nineteenth-century German political theories through the lens of
representationalism and found it rife with openings to skepticism. Though
Enlightened Absolutism, rooted in rationalist metaphysics, with its “formal
definitions, inferences, proofs, and the like,” had, he believed, “more or less
disappeared” (GPR §2A), Conservatism and Romanticism, both tied ultimately to
empiricist forms of justification, were, particularly in their subjectivist and
historicist forms, ascendant and their identification of right with personal or
communal conviction, he contended, promoted nothing less than a “hatred of
law (Gesetz)” (GW 14,1, 10/Werke 7, 20/Nisbet, 17). He therefore saw the
terrain within which he sought to establish the need for his own method of
normative justification as a pitched battle to ground right itself. Because it
merely presupposes right, rather than providing it with valid justification,
representationalism, in all its forms, threatened to reduce political authority to a
dogmatic “shackle” opposed to any sense of freedom. In so doing, it threatened
to render the very core of right itself, its legitimate hold or bindingness over
conduct and character, invalid. Hegel thus saw the very concept of right as
endangered by the traditional forms of normative justification and their
attendant political theories. He thus conceived his own project as a contribution
to working out what he called the appropriate “rational form” for the deeply
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rational content of right because it is only when right possesses this proper
form, he argued, that it will be firmly and finally established, that is, it will only
then be “justified to free thinking”:
For such thinking does not stop at what is given, whether the latter is supported
by the external positive authority of the state or of mutual agreement among
human beings, or by the authority of inner feeling and the heart and by the
testimony of the spirit which immediately concurs with this, but starts out from
itself and thereby demands to know itself as united in its innermost being with
the truth (GW 14,1, 7/Werke 7, 14/Nisbet, 11).
A genuine science of right is thus demanded, as Hegel understands it, by the

fundamental principle of critical thought itself—that we must have the courage
to think for ourselves—what Kant proclaimed to be the core dictum of the
Enlightenment. (p.56) To take the given as the standard of right—and this, as
we have seen, is precisely what stands at the core of the project of
representationalism—is to cede the very ground of normativity itself.
2.1.3. From Representation to Systematicity

When we reviewed the objects of inquiry of the representational forms of
knowledge that Hegel lists in the opening paragraph of the Encyclopedia, we left
one aside—Recht—right, the traditional subject matter, Hegel tells us, of
jurisprudence, in German, Rechtswissenschaft, the science of right. We can
already see that the line of argument that Hegel has mounted against
representational forms of knowledge, in general, and the representational forms
of traditional normative justification, in particular, requires a profound
rethinking of this object and of the methodology that seeks to found it. The
pivotal question, then, for Hegel, is what would constitute a non-
representational form of Recht and, correlatively, what would be a genuine
science of right? We have seen that the central problem of representational
forms of knowledge in general is that they presuppose both their object and
their methodology. We have also seen that, although he rejects their basic
justificatory strategies, Hegel affirms the fundamental goals of rationalism and
empiricism, namely that the concept of right must be defined and that it must be
conceived concretely. What would it mean, then, to begin in political philosophy
without taking the nature or the existence of what one was investigating, namely
Recht, for granted and without a justificatory procedure already in place by
which to consider the matter? What would it mean to understand right in a
conceptually precise, yet determinate fashion?
Hegel has already shown that to justify the authoritativeness of right requires a
type of argumentation that is not beholden to representation, one that, out of
fidelity to the principle of critique itself, abjures all presuppositions. Such a
science would have to be, in a word, systematic. Of course, with this, we have in
hand what amounts to the negative criterion for Hegel’s project, and we can now
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clearly see the methodological imperative that motivated this enterprise, but the
question still remains: what would a genuine system of right such as this look
like? What would be its distinctive form of normative argumentation?
2.2. Systematic Normative Justification

As we noted at the beginning of this chapter, it is precisely on this issue that
Hegel leaves us with a dilemma: he repeatedly proclaims that what is ultimately
distinctive about his science of right is its systematic method, and that it ought
to be judged by this standard alone, yet he also acknowledges that, throughout
the Elements of the Philosophy of Right, he presupposes a familiarity with this
kind of scientific procedure and even admits to omitting the precise derivation of
each and every detail involved in this project. The dilemma is certainly ironic
since, as we have seen, the science of right (p.57) clearly presupposes a
method that is itself committed to taking nothing for granted. Yet, despite this,
Hegel does offer students of the Elements of the Philosophy of Right several
methodological statements that, although brief, we can take, together with his
rejection of representationalism, as guiding clues to develop an account of
systematic normative justification. In this section, then, I use these passages to
work out a basic sketch of Hegel’s general philosophical methodology and I then
show how this method serves him as a distinctly non-representationalist form of
normative justification.
2.2.1. Systematicity and Justification

Hegel’s remarks regarding philosophical method define systematic justification
in terms of three fundamental and interrelated principles—(1) immanent
development, (2) necessary entailment, and (3) retrogressive grounding—and
one fundamental precondition: the justification of the systematic standpoint
itself. Let us consider each of these elements in turn.
The cornerstone of the systematic form of justification is its commitment to

presuppositionlessness. As we have seen, in distinction from
representationalism, this means that systematic justification cannot presuppose
its object, its content, nor can it presuppose its method, its form. But if neither
the subject matter of the science, nor its mode of demonstration can be taken as
given, then the justification of each can only be established together. Object and
method, content and form, must be inseparably one. The content cannot be
taken over and simply unpacked, nor can the method be presupposed and
applied to whatever the subject of investigation may be. The epistemic
credentials of both must be established together. In philosophical science, Hegel
says in the famous preface to the Elements of the Philosophy of Right, “the
content is essentially bound up with the form” (GW 14,1, 6/Werke 7, 13/Nisbet,
10).
Systematic justification’s commitment to set aside all assumptions thus entails

methodological immanence. Its basic task is to suspend all that might serve as
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preconceptions about both the nature of the object it seeks to examine and the
procedures to be employed in justifying it and, instead, faithfully to observe the
way in which the matter at issue develops wholly of itself and thus how it itself
demands to be thought. Systematic justification, as a general philosophical
enterprise, therefore seeks to do nothing other than attend to the immanent
conceptual unfolding of its object for it is only in abiding by this stipulation that
dogmatism and skepticism can be avoided—because nothing is taken for
granted, nothing is open to the skeptic’s trilemma—and, concordantly, form and
content can truly be one. As Hegel puts it in the Elements of the Philosophy of
Right, a science of right must “observe (zuzusehen) the matter at issue’s own
immanent development” (GPR §2) and this is the “method whereby the concept,
in science, develops itself out of itself and is merely an immanent progression
and production of its own determinations” (GPR §31).
But if, as Hegel argues, the task of philosophical science is to grasp the
immanent development of its subject matter, then this development must be
intrinsic to the (p.58) matter itself. It cannot be produced by extrinsic
associations. That is to say, for the development of an object to be genuinely
immanent, it must be the whole and complete unfolding of the nature of the
matter itself; it must be the articulation of its essence. The immanent
development of an object is thus the unfolding of the set of properties that make
an object what it is; the features that demarcate it from all other things, its
“determinations (Bestimmungen)”. But since these determinations are the
essential predicates of the object, their unfolding must correspond to their
inherent relationality. Given that these determinations mutually constitute the
object, their relations to one another must be that of necessity. That is, since
these determinations are mutually and exhaustively implicative, each property
must, of necessity, entail the other. The modality of the development thus follows
from its immanence. The conceptual elaboration of a matter is the development
of one concept into another where the former necessarily entails the latter. As
Hegel puts it, the principal concern of philosophical knowledge is “the necessity
of the concept” (GPR §2A).
The commitment to immanent development leads to that of necessary entailment

and this to what is arguably the most innovative and distinctive feature of
Hegel’s theory of systematic justification: retrogressive grounding. The idea
follows out the central implication of presuppositionlessness. Hegel recognizes
that to suspend all presuppositions disallows taking the veracity of the object
from which one starts for granted, and since observing the immanent unfolding
of the object is setting out the complex of properties that makes the object what
it is, the line of argumentation involved in this kind of justificatory enterprise
cannot follow that of traditional linear derivation. Specifically, the beginning
cannot serve, as in conventional forms of justification, as a foundational or non-
inferential axiom from which further premises or conclusions are to be deduced.
Systematic justification, for Hegel, is thus not a conventional foundationalist
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form of argumentation. But its rejection of classical foundations and the

epistemology of intuition does not lead Hegel to affirm that justification is a
function solely of the relationships that are able to be established between
various claims or concepts, the central tenet of coherentism. Instead, Hegel’s
method cuts a clear path between these conventional alternatives.
As we have seen, the hallmark of systematic justification is that it sets forth the
immanent and necessary unfolding of its object. What this kind of analysis shows
is that the object with which the inquiry begins is comprised of a set of
necessary relations between concepts. As mutually necessary and exhaustively
implicative, these relations constitute the object in question as what it is. These
relations, then, are the ground of the object that they together comprise.
Accordingly, the linear progression from the object to the conceptual relations
that constitute it is a retrogression into its ground, the origin, and truth upon
which the object with which we begin depends and from which it arises. In
systematic justification, then, to move forward is, in a sense, to move back and
to move back is to secure the non-arbitrary status and veracity of what precedes.
Hegel thus refers to the object of science as the “result (Resultat)” of that which
precedes it: “In philosophical cognition … the chief concern is the necessity of a
(p.59) concept, and the path by which it has become, as result, [is] its proof
and deduction” (GPR §2A). The proof structure of speculative demonstration
therefore moves from what is in need of justification back into the set of
conceptual relations that form the foundation from which its object originates
and upon which it continually depends.
But an important problem obviously remains here. As it stands, the construction

of a system, for Hegel, seems to be little more than the fashioning of a “seamless
web” of interdependence. But this model does not, of itself at least, ensure that
its members and their interrelations are in any way truth preserving. That is to
say, it looks as though Hegel has advanced a holistic account of knowledge that
is open to the classical objection that coherence is not itself a sufficient indicator
of truth. A body of knowledge that holds together does not, by virtue of that fact
alone, entail that it properly articulates the joints and junctures of reality.
Hegel recognized this crucial problem and, throughout his career, maintained
that the standpoint from which the system of reason is to be constructed, the
standpoint of systematic knowledge, itself stands in need of justification. He
devised several distinct epistemic strategies by which to address this issue, the
specifics of which cannot be examined here,13 but they all had the same mission:
to establish the oneness of thought and being so that the concepts and relations
out of which the system is to be fashioned already had their ontological
credentials secured, that, as he put it, the “determinations of thinking” have the
“value and significance of being in and for themselves the ground of
everything” (Enz. [1817] §17).
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Systematic justification thus stands on the terrain cleared and vindicated by this
preparatory investigation and, by so doing, its observing of the immanent and
necessary unfolding of a subject matter back into its ground is, at its core, a
form of what can (p.60) be called ontological justification, an establishing of
the fundamental orders and constitutive processes of being. Hegel is thus able to
capture the core of foundationalism’s concern with grasping the nature and
truth of reality itself and coherentism’s insistence on constitutive relational
dependence in a way that avoids the dogmatism of the former and the relativism
of the latter.
Taken together, then, the principles of systematic justification and the

vindication of the systematic standpoint mean that the warrant of a concept,
claim, or belief to be what it purports to be is vindicated if and only if it is shown
to be a moment that is either itself the result of a conceptual unfolding of some
object or is a moment in a differential relation included in such a progression.
The construction of this kind of system is therefore, at the same time, the
justification of its constitutive parts.
2.2.2. Systematic Method

To complete our sketch of Hegel’s model of systematic justification, we need
briefly to turn from its metaphilosophical underpinnings to the actual system
itself. We do so not in order to set out its shape and structure, but solely to note
the special role that its first part, the Science of Logic, plays in the system as a
whole. As we have seen, in order for systematic justification to avoid the threats
of dogmatism and skepticism inherent in representational forms of knowledge, it
is entitled to assume neither its content, nor any form of argumentation. This
means that Hegel’s appeals to the necessity of assessing his work in terms of its
speculative methodology must refer to the distinctive method that the system
itself establishes from within itself. This is one of the fundamental tasks of the
first part of the system, the Science of Logic.
Hegel there sets forth, following the principles of immanence, necessity, and
retrogressive grounding, a fundamental ontology, a genuinely critical
metaphysics, that has, as its culmination, an account of the basic structure of
systematic method. The placement of the discussion is itself telling. Method is
the culmination of the project of the Science of Logic. Its epistemic standing is
thus a matter of the way in which it follows from the ontological analyses that
precede it. Justification stands or falls not just on its systematic form, but with
its metaphysical content.
The line of argument that Hegel develops in the Logic begins with the emptiness
of the concept of pure being, for only this is left when all presuppositions have
been laid aside. Hegel shows that, if the immanent developmental structure of
being is followed, it proves to be nothing other than what he calls “actuality
(Wirklichkeit),” the set of all entities that are constituted in and their complete
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necessary and reciprocal causal interaction with one another. Crucially, he then
argues that this thoroughgoing relationality is itself produced by an immanent
generative process. This process is the movement of self-differentiation. All
objects come to be what they are through self-negation, that is to say, all entities
attain their own self-identity by othering themselves, and, in and through this
negation, come finally to be themselves. Hegel calls this movement the concept
(Begriff), well aware that he is diverging from its traditional usage to (p.61)
denote that which is common to several objects. When this logical process is
fully and exhaustively differentiated, that is, when it is no longer just a process,
but when its complete conceptual structure has been explicated, and thus fully
actualized, it is, he says, the idea (Idee), again moving away from its received
definition as an unchanging, universal exemplar. Hegel’s central claim in the
Logic, and the core of his system as a whole, is thus that the actualized
movement of self-differentiation, the idea, is the absolute ground and truth of
being, the foundation of all objects and relations.
Now, having demonstrated this thesis about the fundamental nature of reality,
Hegel turns, in the final chapter of the work, to the issue of method (cf. Enz.
[1817] §§183–91, esp. 185–90). There he argues that since the pattern that the
constitutive process exhibits—its movement from immediate identity to
immanent differentiation and, from this, this negation necessarily negating itself,
to its deeper, more concrete fulfillment—shows itself to be the fundamental
ontological structure of being, this structure is not only the governing form in
and through which all things come to be what they are, but it must at the same
time be the method, the way of knowing, that is true to the process of
determination inherent within being itself. Hegel thus concludes that the proper
method of philosophical argumentation—if it is not to be, as it is in
representational forms of knowledge, a ready-made procedure applied to each
and every object from without—must be this form of immanent development. To
be, then, is to be a moment in the process of immanent differentiation; it is to be
part of the process of becoming-other whereby all things come to be
determinate. Showing something to be such a moment is thus to give it its
proper justification, the demonstration of its true standing, of its standing in the
movement of actualization that is the concept. This process, of course, is the
infamous “higher dialectic of the concept,” which consists, Hegel tells us, “in
producing and seizing the determination not merely as an opposite and
restriction, but as the positive content and result that it [the dialectic of the
concept] contains as that whereby it is alone a development and immanent
progression” (GPR §31A).
Obviously much more would need to be said in order to offer a full interpretation
and defense of Hegel’s account of method here, but this much suffices to show
that the distinctive concern of the Science of Logic is not just ontological, but,
ultimately, epistemological, for what the first part of the system establishes is
that the true way of knowing, the way of knowing things in their truth, is nothing
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other than the process of development that is proper to being itself and this is to
grasp the rationality, the dialectic of the concept, within all that is. It follows that
the other parts of the system, the Philosophies of Nature and of Spirit, the latter
of which the Philosophy of Right is a part, are properly subordinate to the
Science of Logic since it is only insofar as they discern the movement of the
concept, the movement set out and established by the Logic, as the process
constitutive of their own distinct domains that their claims and concepts are able
to stand vindicated.14 The fundamental task of philosophical knowledge, for (p.
62) Hegel, is thus to grasp the movement of the dialectic as the immanent
process whereby any and all objects come to be determinate, and that is, as
Hegel puts it, “to bring to consciousness the matter’s own work of reason” (GPR
§31A).
2.2.3. Systematicity and Normativity

With this account of systematic justification in hand, we can now come to the
second of our original questions: how is the systematic method of argumentation
able to serve as a form of normative justification?
As we have seen, the hallmark of systematic justification is its rejection of

representationalism and the commitment to the principles of immanence,
necessity, and retrogressive grounding that this entails. Furthermore, we saw
Hegel argue that the pattern that the process of immanent development exhibits
is that of the self-differentiating movement of the concept as it actualizes itself
into the idea. Systematic justification, then, is attending to the immanent and
necessary unfolding of an object back into its ground where this development
proves to be fundamentally dialectical. The question now before us is thus how
this unique method is able to vindicate the authoritativeness of a claim with
respect to action or a form of life. That is to say, how can the dialectic of the
concept establish normative warrant?
The core of Hegel’s answer to this question is the necessary relationship that he
contends exists between the concepts of freedom and right. Now we cannot, of
course, treat both of these concepts in the detail that they deserve here, but we
do need to note that Hegel’s examination of the concept of right takes the
concept of freedom as its starting point because it is seeking to set forth a
justification of right itself, and insofar as right is claimed to be authoritative with
respect to the conduct and character of free agents, then the dictates of the
systematic method require that right be shown to follow—immanently, of
necessity, and as the ground of—the concept of freedom. The basic shape of
Hegel’s broader argument regarding this relationship becomes clear by
examining the first two paragraphs of the Philosophy of Right. To do so, we
begin by returning, once again, to the problem of representation.
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(p.63) Representational forms of knowledge, we recall, take the object of their

inquiry—an image borne originally from intuition, but generalized by the power
of representation—for granted. To treat right as a representational object would
be to take it either as the natural law of rationalism or the feeling, sentiment, or
tradition of empiricism. Down both of these paths, as we have seen, lie
dogmatism and the skeptic’s trilemma. A truly critical account of right must be
presuppositionless. It must set aside the conceptions offered by intellectual and
sensible intuition and, instead, begin with nothing other than the pure concept
of right itself. But what exactly is this?
Hegel begins the Philosophy of Right with a decisive, though stark, statement
that responds to this fundamental question:
The philosophical science of right has the idea (Idee) of right, the concept
of right and its actualization (Verwirklichung), for its object. (GPR §1)
Now if we were to read this proposition by employing the standard definitions of

its principal terms, we would conclude that the kind of philosophical inquiry
being proposed here is concerned with the ultimate exemplar of right, that
which is common to all individual rightful acts, dispositions, and states of affairs,
and with the instantiations of this generality in particular cases. Such an
interpretation would construe Hegel’s project as a form of classical natural law,
presupposing right as a transcendent moral order. But this, of course, is not
what the idea of right is. But neither is it merely an empirical representation, an
expression of subjective desire. Both of these readings would fall prey to
representationalism. Hegel is instead employing the central terms here in the
technical sense that we saw him develop in the Science of Logic, and that means
that what is properly at stake in the science of right, for him, is something quite
different than either of these ready-made conceptions.
Idea, for Hegel, we recall, denotes the fully differentiated concrete realization of
the concept. Accordingly, the idea of right refers to the culmination of a process
whereby the complete relational actuality of right—a world of authoritative
social institutions and practices—is set forth. The proper object of the science of
right is thus not a pregiven transcendent moral order, nor ready made feeling,
sentiment, or tradition, but a set of interrelated normative social and political
structures. The substance of the work to follow, then, that is the substance of the
Philosophy of Right itself, is to unfold the immanent and necessary moments of
this object. The “concept of right and its actualization” thus designates the
generative movement of self-differentiation, the “higher dialectic,” whereby the
interdependent domain of right is constituted and its standing as ground of all
that precedes it is vindicated. The object of the science of right, then, is not
simply the result of this process, the constituted domain of normativity, but the
conceptual progression of which this normative whole proves to be the result. In
other words, the object of the science of right is the unfolding of the concept of
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right from its abstract immediacy through its immanent self-negation whereby it
comes into its own as a concrete whole.
(p.64) Hegel notes the special sense in which the notions of concept and idea
are being employed here in the Remark to this opening paragraph:
Philosophy has to do with ideas and therefore not with what are commonly
called mere concepts. On the contrary, it exposes the latter as one-sided
and untruthful, and that it is the concept alone (not what is so often called
by that name, but which is merely an abstract determination of the
understanding) that has actuality, and in such a way that it gives actuality
to itself. (GPR §1A)
The task of the science of right is thus rigorously to observe the immanent
development of the pure concept of right into its interdependent whole, which is
to say, its complete actualization, the concept becoming actualized as idea, the
way that “it gives actuality to itself.” But how does this in any way establish the
authoritativeness of right itself?
Hegel’s answer to this question comes in the second paragraph of the work.
“The science of right,” he reminds us, “is a part of philosophy” (GPR §2). From
this simple proposition, he draws two implications that stand at the very core of
the project of the Philosophy of Right. The first, as we have already noted, is that
for the science of right to be a genuinely philosophical, as opposed to a
representational, form of inquiry, it must commit itself, as he puts it here, “to
observe the matter at issue’s own immanent development” (GPR §2). The
method of a philosophical science of right must be immanent, necessary, and
retrogressive; in a word, systematic.
The second implication is the more relevant for our present purposes:
As a part, it [the science of right] has a determinate starting point, which is

the result and truth of what preceded it, and what preceded it constitutes
the so-called proof of that result. Hence, the concept of right, so far as its
becoming is concerned, falls outside the science of right; its deduction is
presupposed here and is to be taken as given. (GPR §2)
Like the first paragraph, the passage initially appears deeply puzzling, if not
simply misleading. It seems to suggest that the science of right presupposes its
object, the concept of right. We, of course, know that this can’t be the case, but
what exactly does it mean to say that the “proof [Beweis]” of the core concept of
the science “falls outside” the science itself? How can a science where the
justification of right is not itself a part of the science be a form of systematic
normative justification?
Page 21 of 27
The key here is the term “part [Teil].” Hegel’s claim is that the science of right is
a distinctly philosophical endeavor and, as such, it must abide by the systematic
principles of immanence, necessity, and retrogressive grounding. But, as a part,
it is not itself the whole of philosophical science. It is a distinct science within a
broader system. This means that the justification of the object whose immanent
development the philosophical science of right seeks to observe must necessarily
precede this specific science. The “becoming [Werden]” of the concept of right—
by which Hegel means its genesis as a moment within the immanent and
necessary unfolding of a more basic concept—“falls outside” the science of right.
But since this development of right from a more (p.65) basic concept is, in
systematic justification, as we have seen, the proof of its ontological and
epistemological standing, then the justification of right itself is, strictly speaking,
not what is at issue in the science of right proper. How then are we to
understand the science of right in relation to the justification of its object?
Hegel’s crucial thesis, the one upon which the entire normative character of the
argument of the Philosophy of Right hinges, is that the justification of the
concept of right consists in its being shown to be the immanent and necessary
ground—the result or truth, as Hegel will say—of the more basic, and thus less
determinate, concept of freedom. That is to say, unfolding the essential
determinations of freedom shows that it is what it is only by virtue of the
concept of right. Right, then, is the condition of the possibility of freedom. The
content of these claims, of course, needs to be unpacked, but the issue at
present is the fundamental structure of this kind of argumentation: how is it able
to establish the authoritativeness of right itself and how can this
authoritativeness, in turn, be said to flow to the more concrete determinations of
right, its actualization?
The systematic method proves decisive precisely here for it is only by following
its strictures that the normative standing of right and its concrete
determinations can be justified in a way that avoids the dangers of skepticism.
The nerve of Hegel’s systematic justification of the concept of right is that it is
the result of the immanent and necessary unfolding of the essential
determinations of freedom and thus is its ground. As such, right is not only
essential to being free, it has binding authority over all forms of free acting.
Under representational forms of knowledge, it is simply taken for granted that
right—whether it is conceived as a transcendent moral order, as in rationalist
Enlightened Absolutism, or as the weight of tradition and desire, as in empiricist
Conservatism and Romanticism—possesses legitimate authority over conduct
and character. Such approaches thereby render the relationship that stands at
the very core of the problem of normativity vulnerable to arbitrariness,
regressivity, or vicious circularity. Systematic justification, to the contrary, is
able to show that right is not only one of the essential determinations discovered
in the unfolding of freedom, it is the concrete existence, the necessary
embodiment, through which human striving is able to be genuinely free. But if
Page 22 of 27
being free is made possible by right itself, then this concept and its further, more
concrete, determinations possess legitimate binding authority with respect to
free actions and forms of life because they have proved to be the retrogressive
ground of freedom itself. The normativity that is right thus flows from its being
the necessary enabling condition of freedom: “the system of right is the realm of
actualized freedom” (GPR §4).
Given this interpretation of Hegel’s project, the philosophical science of right is

thus indeed defined by its distinctive systematic methodology, its “philosophical
manner of progressing from one matter to another and of conducting a scientific
proof, the speculative way of knowing in general” (GW 14,1, 5/Werke 7, 12/
Nisbet, 10). And we have seen that this is nothing less than its commitment,
negatively, to presuppositionlessness, the rejection of representationalism, and
positively, to immanence, (p.66) necessity, and retrogressive grounding, to the
“higher dialectic of the concept.” The critique of representationalism allowed
Hegel to move beyond the confines of the conceptual space of late eighteenth-
and early nineteenth-century German political thought and its traditional forms
of justification, and to outflank the Agrippan challenge that lurked behind these
boundaries. But it was by bringing the demands of immanence, necessity, and
retrogressive grounding to bear on the concept of freedom that he was able to
open a decisively new pathway for thinking and justifying normativity itself. The
object of the science of right is the “concept of right and its actualization,” the
idea of right, and this is nothing other than the immanent and necessary
unfolding of right as the enabling institutional embodiment of freedom. The
normative standing of a concept, principle, institution, or practice thus derives,
on Hegel’s account, from its being shown to be a necessary determination, and
this means a necessary actualization, of freedom. In this way, one can claim that
the fundamental thesis of Hegel’s philosophical science of right is that
systematicity is the only form of argumentation that is truly capable of fulfilling
the task of normative justification. This method, in turn, places the essential
relationship between freedom and right at the very heart of political philosophy
in a truly unique fashion, where the nature of the latter flows directly from the
nature of the former.
Notes:
(1) For a useful review of this issue, see Hans-Friedrich Fulda, “Zum
Theorietypus der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie,” in Hegels Philosophie des
Rechts: Die Theorie der Rechtsformen, ed. Dieter Henrich and Rolf-Peter
Horstmann (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1982): 393–427, and for an excellent
overview and more recent assessment of the broader terms of the debate, see
Jean-François Kervégan, L’effectif et le rationnel: Hegel et l’esprit objectif (Paris:
Vrin, 2007): 7–15.
Page 23 of 27
(2) Major representatives of the systematic-metaphysical tendency include: Hugh

Reyburn, Hegel’s Ethical Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967); Manfred
Riedel, Studien zu Hegels Rechtsphilosophie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1969); Emil Angehrn, Freiheit und System bei Hegel (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1977);
Dieter Henrich, “Vernunft in Verwirklichung,” in Georg Friedrich Wilhelm [sic]
Hegel, Philosophie des Rechts. Die Vorlesung von 1819/20 in einer Nachschrift,
ed. Dieter Henrich (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982): 9–39; and Adriaan T.
Peperzak, Modern Freedom: Hegel’s Legal, Moral, and Political Philosophy
(Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001).
(3) Excellent statements of what has come to be called the “non-metaphysical”

reading of Hegel can be found in its originator, Klaus Hartmann, “Ideen zu
einem neuen systematischen Verständnis der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie,”
Perspektiven der Philosophie 2 (1976): 167–200; in the early work of his student,
Terry Pinkard, “Freedom and Social Categories,” Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research 47 (1986): 209–32; and, more recently and in a
more developed form, in the work of Robert Pippin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy:
Rational Agency as Ethical Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
(4) Influential versions of this now somewhat neglected view are to be found in
Joachim Ritter, Metaphysik und Politik: Studien zu Aristoteles und Hegel
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969) and Charles Taylor, Hegel and Modern
Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
(5) The most prominent and substantive representative of the non-systematic,

non-metaphysical view is Allen W. Wood, Hegel’s Ethical Thought (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990). However, there have been and continue to
be important variants of this approach. Some scholars favor replacing the
systematic and metaphysical foundations of Hegel’s political philosophy with a
version of the phenomenological approach found in Hegel’s Jena period: see, for
instance, Karl-Heinz Ilting, “Rechtsphilosophie als Phänomenologie des
Bewusstseins der Freiheit,” in Hegels Philosophie des Rechts: Die Theorie der
Rechtsformen, ed. Dieter Henrich and Rolf-Peter Horstmann (Stuttgart: Klett-
Cotta, 1982): 225–54; and Mark Tunick, “Hegel’s Nonfoundationalism: A
Phenomenological Account of the Structure of the Philosophy of Right,” History
of Philosophy Quarterly 11 (1994): 317–37. While others have argued for a more
broadly social scientific reading: Michael O. Hardimon, Hegel’s Social
Philosophy: The Project of Reconciliation (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994); and Frederick Neuhouser, Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory:
Actualizing Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
(6) On the decisive role of skepticism, and the “Agrippan Trilemma”, in

particular, in German Idealism, see Paul W. Franks, All or Nothing: Systematicity,
Page 24 of 27
Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism (Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
(7) Cf. Enz. [1817]: §36. The centrality of presuppositionlessness to Hegel’s

philosophical enterprise has been most forcefully articulated and defended by
Stephen Houlgate, The Opening of Hegel’s Logic: From Being to Infinity (West
Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2006): chapter 2.
(8) For this characterization of the distinction between rationalist and empiricist
conceptions of rationality, see Frederick C. Beiser, “Two Concepts of Reason in
German Idealism,” in Internationales Jahrbuch des Deutschen Idealismus (2003)/
International Yearbook of German Idealism (2003): Konzepte der Rationalität/
Concepts of Rationality (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2002): 13–27.
(9) On the theory and policies of Enlightened Absolutism in Germany, see Karl
Otmar Freiherr von Aretin, ed., Der Aufgeklärte Absolutismus (Köln:
Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 1974); Leonard Krieger, An Essay on the Theory of
Enlightened Despotism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1975); and
Franklin Kopitzsch, ed., Aufklärung, Absolutismus und Bürgertum in
Deutschland (München: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1976).
(10) On the development of Conservatism in Germany, see Klaus Epstein, The

Genesis of German Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1966).
(11) For discussions of the political philosophy of German Romanticism, see

Jakob Baxa, Einführung in die romantische Staatswissenschaft (Jena: Fischer,
1923); Jacques Droz, Le romantisme allemand et l’état (Paris: Payot, 1966);
Theodore Ziolkowski, German Romanticism and Its Institutions (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1990): chapter 3; and Frederick C. Beiser,
Enlightenment, Revolution, and Romanticism: The Genesis of Modern German
Political Thought, 1790–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992):
part II.
(12) Hegel does not explicitly address the theories of the Conservatives. He,
instead, analyzes the methodological weaknesses that they share with their
empiricist brethren among the Romantics.
(13) In the period under investigation here, Hegel marked out two distinct
approaches to the issue of establishing the veracity of the systematic standpoint:
(1) the phenomenological investigation of the forms of consciousness to show
that absolute knowing is the condition for the possibility of all more elementary
kinds of knowledge, the project he had undertaken in the Phenomenology of
Spirit (1807); and (2) the decision simply to think purely, that is, to abstract from
Page 25 of 27
anything and everything and for thought thereby to grasp itself in its own
simplicity (cf. Enz. [1817] §36A).
The first route is obviously well known, though its exact significance is disputed.
The second is less so, so a word about it is in order: to think purely, to think
abstractly, has a twofold sense.
Firstly, it is a disengaging of thought from its entanglement with all that it takes
for granted; in this sense, it is a suspension of thought’s commitments, whether
tacit or explicit, to any and all preconceptions about itself and the world it
inhabits.
Secondly, though it is a withdrawal, it is not an escape into nothing, it not only

“abstracts from everything”, but rather, having done this, it “grasps its pure
abstraction”, namely itself, the activity of thinking, in its “simplicity”. Now, given
that such thought has set aside the core assumptions of representation, and the
centerpiece of these is the presupposition that the knowing subject stands over
against the object it seeks to know, Hegel claims that to think purely is not,
strictly speaking, a form of knowledge at all. In grasping itself, it does not know
itself, rather it withdraws into itself and exists as nothing other than the mere
activity of withdrawal. It is not known, nor conceived of, it simply and
immediately is.
Hegel therefore concludes that to think purely and abstractly is to think pure
being, being in general. A truly presuppositionless system must begin then with
the “objective thought” of being, free from any specificity or concreteness of any
kind; in other words, a genuine system must begin with the sheer indeterminacy
of being.
(14) My claim here is simply that insofar as the Logic sets forth and establishes
the method by which the rest of the system argues, its account plays a
controlling role in all the subsequent analyses. In support of this approach, I
appeal to Hegel’s articulation of the relationship between Logic, Nature, and
Spirit at Enz. [1817] §477 where Logic, in the properly philosophical way of
construing the syllogistic structure of the system, is said to play the role of
mediating middle term between the extremes of Spirit and Nature.
On the vexed problem of the exact relationship between the Logic and the
Philosophy of Right, see Herbert Schnädelbach, “Zum Verhältnis von Logik und
Gesellschaftstheorie bei Hegel,” in Aktualität und Folgen der Philosophie Hegels,
ed. Oskar Negt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970): 58–80; Kenley Royce
Dove, “Logik und Recht bei Hegel,” Neue Hefte für Philosophie 17 (1979): 89–
108; Manfred Hanisch, Dialektische Logik und politisches Argument:
Untersuchungen zu den methodischen Grundlagen der Hegelschen
Staatsphilosophie (Königstein: Forum Academicum, 1981); Heinz Kimmerle,
“‘Wissenschaft der Logik’ als Grundlegung seines Systems der Philosophie: Über
Page 26 of 27
das Verhältnis von ‘Logik’ und ‘Realphilosophie,’ ” in Die Logik des Wissens und
das Problem der Erziehung, ed. Wilhelm Raimund Beyer (Hamburg: Felix
Meiner, 1982): 52–60; Henning Ottmann, “Hegelsche Logik und
Rechtsphilosophie: Unzulängliche Bemerkungen zu einem ungelösten Problem,”
Hegels Philosophie des Rechts: Die Theorie der Rechtsformen, ed. Dieter
Henrich and Rolf-Peter Horstmann (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1982): 382–91; and
Denis L. Rosenfield, Politique et liberté: Une étude sur la structure logique de la
Philosophie du droit de Hegel (Paris: Aubier, 1984).
Page 27 of 27

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Systematicity and Normative Justification

Hegel's Political Philosophy: On the Normative

Print publication date: 2017

Systematicity and Normative Justification

Abstract and Keywords

Keywords: Hegel, method, systematicity, German Idealism, metaphysics, philosophy of right

The aim of what follows is to set out an interpretation of the method of

2.1. Normativity and the Traditional Representational Forms of Justification

Now for a method of justification to succeed in establishing a genuine grounding

The radicality of Hegel’s political philosophy, like that of his philosophical

Hegel’s central contention is that all other competing methods of normative

2.1.1. The Traditional Forms of Normative Justification: Rationalism and Empiricism

On the empiricist construal, a principle, concept, institution, or practice is

Hegel’s decisive insight was to recognize that these divergent strands of

2.1.2. Normativity and the Problem of Representation

In the opening paragraph of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in

beginning of science, so that in the course of further development,

Hegel offers examples of representations as they function as the subject matter

unbounded universalities of conceptual thought. And this means that these

If we turn now to the methodologies of such forms of knowledge, we find that

Accordingly, representation renders the method and objects of representational

Hegel examines the representational underpinnings of rationalism as the rubric

the empirical (p.53) world by abstracting from it all that it deems to be in

Similarly, rationalism’s methodology seeks to produce genuine knowledge by

Hegel draws the implications of this critique of rationalism and empiricism as

Hegel considers empiricism as a form of normative justification under the guise

A genuine science of right is thus demanded, as Hegel understands it, by the

2.1.3. From Representation to Systematicity

2.2. Systematic Normative Justification

2.2.1. Systematicity and Justification

The cornerstone of the systematic form of justification is its commitment to

Systematic justification’s commitment to set aside all assumptions thus entails

The commitment to immanent development leads to that of necessary entailment

form of argumentation. But its rejection of classical foundations and the

But an important problem obviously remains here. As it stands, the construction

Taken together, then, the principles of systematic justification and the

2.2.2. Systematic Method

2.2.3. Systematicity and Normativity

As we have seen, the hallmark of systematic justification is its rejection of

(p.63) Representational forms of knowledge, we recall, take the object of their

Now if we were to read this proposition by employing the standard definitions of

As a part, it [the science of right] has a determinate starting point, which is

Given this interpretation of Hegel’s project, the philosophical science of right is

(2) Major representatives of the systematic-metaphysical tendency include: Hugh

(3) Excellent statements of what has come to be called the “non-metaphysical”

(5) The most prominent and substantive representative of the non-systematic,

(6) On the decisive role of skepticism, and the “Agrippan Trilemma”, in

Transcendental Arguments, and Skepticism in German Idealism (Cambridge,

(7) Cf. Enz. [1817]: §36. The centrality of presuppositionlessness to Hegel’s

(10) On the development of Conservatism in Germany, see Klaus Epstein, The

(11) For discussions of the political philosophy of German Romanticism, see

Secondly, though it is a withdrawal, it is not an escape into nothing, it not only

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